


The Nature of Flowers

by Mab (Mab_Browne)



Category: Hyakujitsu no Bara | Maiden Rose
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-09
Updated: 2018-06-09
Packaged: 2019-05-20 02:05:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,244
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14885570
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mab_Browne/pseuds/Mab
Summary: Taki always suspected that he guessed first that he and Klaus had met before Luckenwalde.





	The Nature of Flowers

**Author's Note:**

> This is not what I wanted it to be, but there comes a point where you just have to say, 'enough faffing about' and either post something or forget about it. I chose to post. Also I'm really grateful that this is Alt-Japan because what I know about real Japan's history and culture would fit in a rather small teacup.

“I should choose some flowers now?” Taki asked.

“Or greenery. Whatever you think will be a worthy offering – and that can be fixed to your headdress.” Kaito smiled. 

“So not too small or bushy,” Taki replied, a little nettled but not showing it. He knew his duty, and of course the flowers needed to be able to be attached to his headdress. It would be silly otherwise.

He was glad to step out into the garden. He had been drilled in his dance with great care, but on such a hugely important occasion both Taki and his tutors were nervous, and the fresh air and the spring scent of the good earth and plants calmed some of Taki’s anxiety into settled purpose.

What would be best? Young, green leaves? The last of the sakura? But he already knew what would be the most worthy. He walked along the path until he came to the great wisteria trees and the flowers that dropped from them to wave pale purple in the breeze.

The best flowers were out of his reach but he had time to return to the robing chamber and ask Kaito for help. He turned at the sound of footsteps on the gravel path. Instead of a courtier or servitor, he saw a boy, older than Taki, and clearly a foreigner. His face was turned up to the wisteria with an expression of sublime pleasure.

The boy was lanky and awkward as he walked, and as tall as a grown man. Taki took his height as a sign, and didn’t even try to remember what the polite forms of the foreigner’s language might be. “Lift me up so that I can reach the best blossoms,” he asked.

The boy looked at Taki. He was startled, clearly, but he came forward and lifted Taki so that he could snap off his choice of flower. His grip was gentle but sure, and his hair reminded Taki of sunflowers. The foreign boy’s appearance seemed fated, like an old folk tale his nurses might have told, a stranger magically sent in time of need. And the boy had helped, even when he didn’t know Taki or his position at court. He had helped just because Taki asked it. 

“You should be my knight,” Taki said. “Would you be mine?”

The boy’s eyes went even wider. They were golden too, like his hair, and blazed brightly. “If you’d want me,” he said shyly.

Taki nodded. “I should, very much.”

The boy smiled, but the moment was broken by the voices of courtiers calling for Taki. “You’d better grab your flowers quick,” he said. “I don’t think I’m supposed to be here.”

Taki took some choice wisteria blooms, and the boy placed him carefully back upon the ground. “Perhaps I’ll see you later,” he said roughly, shy again, and disappeared amongst the trees.

Taki was escorted to the little temple adjunct and the moment for which he had diligently trained. He didn’t feel nervous at all now – he felt ready, and determined to give honour as was proper.

The boy from the garden was in the audience, along with the other foreigners. Taki danced with his whole heart, thinking of the god of this sacred place, and his uncle, and the spring garden that lay outside this room; but he dared one or two glances towards the foreign watchers. His heart rose just a little more at the glimpses of that bright golden hair, like finally seeing dawn break at the eve of a promising day. He even dared one glance, eyes meeting eyes.

It was over, and his dance tutor and another courtier were there to help Taki remove his ceremonial robe.

“You see, young lord, you did excellently, just as we knew you would. That walk in the garden did you a world of good, and the wisteria was a beautiful choice.”

“Thank you,” Taki said. He felt a little strange still - from anxiety to wonder to surety to relief. So many feelings in so short a time.

Kaito removed the headdress, detaching the wisteria and laying it at the edge of the table. 

“May I keep the flowers?”

“But they’re wilting already,” Kaito said. 

He looked like he wanted to smile, and Taki reminded himself that itwasn’t Kaito’s fault that he didn’t understand. “Please,” he asked. 

Kaito nodded. “I will arrange for them to be taken to your room.” Taki felt a small surge of indignation at the obvious indulgence but he quelled it. He knew it meant that Kaito was fond of him, but being treated like a baby galled. He was small for his age, but hadn’t he just done very well? Kaito had said as much himself.

He hoped the boy in the garden hadn’t thought him rude. Taki had been so very nervous, so determined that he must do well in his dance and that he must wear the wisteria flowers as part of that, and he had ordered the boy like he was a gardener and not a guest of the court. But he hadn’t seemed to mind. He seemed to like Taki, the way that Taki had liked him.

“Do you think that the guests enjoyed the dance?”

Kaito sniffed. “They seemed to, even if I doubt they could quite appreciate it. Your arm, young lord.” Taki dutifully shifted so that the robe could be taken off, and thought a little rebelliously of the foreign boy’s face. He had been moved by the dance, whatever the rest of the visitors thought. The second courtier, Akira, carried the heavy robe away. “You gave honour to the god and the court and your ancestors. That’s all that matters.” Another robe was placed upon him, rather than the Western-styled cadet uniform Taki most commonly wore now. It was a great occasion after all, his uncle’s ascension celebrations, and proper honour was due.

He attended the rest of the celebrations that were appropriate, but he didn’t see the foreign boy again. When he returned to his rooms in the Rose court, the wisteria was there, neatly laid out of the way. It was truly wilting now. Flowers didn’t last; he knew that. It was why they must be celebrated in their season. It still made Taki a little sad, and he scolded himself. There would always be new flowers. (Just, they wouldn’t be the ones that he’d picked with the help of the stranger.)

~*~

At home such things could never have happened; home was thousands of miles away and Taki felt the distance keenly. 

His roommate had claimed the assault on him was tradition. It was a wonder that there was an uncracked skull throughout the academy if such ‘traditions’ were common. And if Taki had made an error, he would have been rebuked, of course mistakes must be corrected, but the Luckenwalde Sergeant’s venomous censure of his incorrect clothing shook him. Taki had seldom seen anyone show unbridled pleasure in another’s humiliation, and would have scorned such an unworthy display. His rage and shame and homesick grief was also an unworthy display, but he had nowhere to hide it except in the cocoon of blankets in his room.

He calmed himself eventually. Setbacks were the nature of life and overcoming them the task and eventual tale of the famed and the wise; skulking with his face hidden would solve nothing. His roommate, Klaus, still sat on the side of the bed. He’d tried to break up the harassment (and been beaten to the floor by Taki for his trouble) and had been kind in an off-hand way as he showed Taki around, before the humiliation before the Sergeant. Taki had come to this western land with a purpose, and it was time he tried to steer this day to a more auspicious beginning.

He had felt foreign and alone since he stepped off the train; the casual gesture of a handshake from this frankly enormous stranger was no less foreign but it did seem more hopeful for the future. 

~*~

The changes between a youth in his teens and a young man in his twenties were many and notable, but still, fewer than there were between a child and a (very) young man. For that reason, Taki always suspected that he guessed first that he and Klaus had met before. It was one of the nights that they climbed on the roofs to look out over the town with its little huddle of lights underneath the enormous star-lit sky. Taki knew their route now, and he reached the ridge first. Klaus was surefooted and quick but he still reached out a hand to Taki as if he needed help. Taki shouldn’t take pleasure in these chances to touch, but he took Klaus’s hand anyway. It was warm and strong within his grip. Klaus looked up at him, and the shape of his face in the moonlight blurred into the memory of golden eyes and hair in the sunlight and scented air of the court gardens. The sense of something known in the unknown, a vague hope, shaped itself into certainty.

“Taki?”

Taki stared up at the sky. So small they both were beneath it, born and bred so far apart, and yet here they were together. “Nothing. It’s a beautiful night.”

“Yes it is.” 

It was also a cool night. Taki liked a certain amount of chill. It braced both mind and body, and his mind needed bracing right now. The cold night air cut into his lungs and steadied him.

Klaus sat close beside him, a private indulgence for them both. “Here, you can borrow some body heat.” Perhaps Klaus mistook Taki’s shudder of emotion for chill. Certainly he had plenty of heat to spare. “It always surprises me how small you are. You feel like you should be bigger somehow.”

Taki shook his head, unable to be offended. “Presumably I’m big enough for whatever is required of me.”

“And that would be?” Klaus asked. He sounded teasing but he leaned into Taki’s side even more, attentive and alert.

“To live honourably. To protect my people.” Taki smiled. “A tank interior is hardly spacious. It seems that fate had a purpose in making me small.”

“You’re important back in your own country. You’re not going to rest on your arse back at headquarters? That’s the traditional way, isn’t it?”

“I will never ask my men to take chances that I won’t!” Taki protested.

“No, I don’t suppose you will,” Klaus said. “It’s a good way to get killed, though.”

“Hans has told me stories of ‘Lycanthrope’. War is always a good way to get killed, but you’re here still.” Taki might still be learning his way in politics, but he knew his room-mate would have been carefully chosen. He waited on Klaus’s explanation with a thumping heart all the same. “Why are you here, Klaus?”

The attentiveness shifted to wariness. “Here amongst the living, or here at Luckenwalde?”

“Here, learning about tank tactics when your heart was once in the sky.”

Klaus was silent a while before he looked up at the starry night once more, and shrugged. “Fate, I suppose, both for living, and Luckenwalde. She’s a fickle bitch.”

“Don’t offer a goddess disrespect. It’s unlucky.”

Klaus laughed at that. “I hope your gods treat you better than mine, Taki. Respectful, wise, gifted. Beautiful.” One hand brushed gently over Taki’s cheek, leaving a heat that flashed through Taki’s whole body. “You deserve to have their blessing.” Surely there was no policy to that touch. Surely not.

“If good things come, then I will be thankful for them.” I am thankful, Taki thought, and not least that I have found you again, whatever circumstances have shaped it.

“I’ll tell you one good thing that we both need, and that’s some sleep. Come on, before our barracks leave is overdue.” Klaus clapped his hand on Taki’s shoulder, no more than any comrade at this western academy would do, (or so Taki told himself) and they made their way down once more.

~*~

An audible gasp rose from the crowd watching Klaus’s investiture when Klaus kissed the hem of his robe. Klaus noticed none of it, only looked up at Taki with his heart in his eyes and said, “Now we can always be together.” He said it softly, for Taki’s ears alone. 

Taki as a child had daydreamed more than once of a foreign knight, a man loyal only to him, belonging only to him. Such a man would never need to fear his lost status and citizenship because any man chosen for the task would be more than equal to it, would be fit mate to Taki’s mind and heart.

He had chosen such a man, but his dreams had never taken account of the demands of his body. The court saw only an unseemly disregard of etiquette. Taki saw Klaus’s utter devotion, yes, but he also saw the reality of his own already broken promises and assurances, like the ground cracked and torn in an earthquake

He stepped down from the dais, and Klaus proudly took his place at Taki’s right hand.

Their moment together in the garden before the investiture, that adult echo of their childhood meeting, had been as perfect as the flowers that drifted around them. It was the nature of flowers that they did not last, but Taki would find a way. Somehow. If only he could see how.


End file.
